Publication Alert!

Three for the price of one

Alakazam!

I am happy to report that my three contest winners from the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative 2023 contest have now been published by the AWC. You can order a fine printed copy of the contest book on Amazon for the low, low price of $5, which, adjusted for inflation is…um…still $5. Come on—it’s only been out for one day.

$5 will get you my three fantabulous works, plus numerous pathetic scribblings by the also-rans.

Kidding! It’s 149 pages of good stuff by a whole crowd of writers, and I am honored to have my work included. It was a joke, okay, about the competitive nature of writing and the monstrousness of ego. I regret the joke but there’s no way—short of using the backspace key, or perhaps using my mouse to select and delete the text—to take it back. No way. Now it belongs to the ages. Shame on me.

If you would rather not spend the bucks but you want to read my stuff, here they are, gratis, as blog posts:

I Want a Doctor Who’s Good at Pretending - a poem.

Mid-Century Modern Dance - an essay.

The Splendor and the Squalor - a one-act play.

Just one note about the play, in case any itinerant scholars specializing in the works of Flannery O’Connor happen to wander by: my play is not satirizing O’Connor. It is satirizing the tendency of Southern writers to morph into a dreary imitation of really good writers of Southern (and often Gothic) works. It asks (or implies) the question: Why’s it gotta be so mean and awful and ignorant? I know, I know: for some folks it is mean and awful and ignorant. To them I say, “Wow, sorry to hear that.” To the pretenders I say, “Enough already.” Now, as a fibber and pretender (aka writer of fiction), I know all about being derivative and falling into the trap of spouting clichés. Been there, done that (hey, I just did it again!) But if you’re going to do Southern Gothic, please come up with something that’s truly good and entertaining and not just mean and awful and ignorant.

Boing!